If you don’t currently use a calendar, then starting to use one will require extra effort and diligence, but the pay-offs are significant, especially if you exploit it to the full. Most of the dangerous open loops have a specific deadline. Calendars are easier to adopt than ubiquitous todo lists because they offer such frequent and abundant advantages.

Beyond the obvious uses of calendars, a cherry-picked GTD element is recording your “Someday/Maybes” against dates. If there is something you may want to do in the future, but not right now, create an entry for 3/6/12 months time to consider doing whatever it is, or defer again.

Everybody should use a calendar (paper or electronic) but it is not the place to store your Someday/Maybes. Someday/Maybe has no date so it is not an element of your hard landscape. You don't want to waste your time deferring your Someday/Maybes all the time.

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Trying to manage your defered actions in the calendar is not a good idea. But the someday/maybe list is actually something that can be managed in the calendar. David himself explains this in his book by saying that you can manage the someday/maybe list in your tickler (which is a paper based calendar).
Reviewing something in 2012 is not going to make you defer it all the time...

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A tickler is not a paper-based calendar, not in the way GTD defines it as far as I know.

A calendar tells you what you will do on a particular day.

A tickler reminds you of certain things on a particular day. Those things may not -- quite possibly will not -- be done on that day.

For example, my tickler contains a number of articles that I want to re-read. When I pull that article out of my tickler, I don't immediately read the article; it goes onto my to-read pile. Similarly, reminders to perform backups or write in my garden journal come out of my tickler and go onto my Next Actions list, to be done when most appropriate.

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I see GTD a little like a house of cards. Unless you stay diligent continually, it's easy for it all to come tumbling down.

I have times when I feel motivated and it's easy to keep on top of things. I also have times when it's very difficult to provide that extra effort to keep on top of life. It's when this happens that my system falls into decay. I don't think I have sufficient periods of sustained stability to develop the habits required by GTD, so individual strategies that can be applied ad-hoc work better for me.

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That's a bit more vague and generic than I'd hoped for, but I can appreciate why you might want to avoid getting into the gruesome details.

I can understand your line of reasoning here, that you feel like you don't have the motivation to implement the entire GTD approach, and so you've picked the elements you think are more helpful and triaged out the rest.

In similar situations I've found it a bit more useful to move in the other direction -- to fully implement GTD but in a very tiny corner of my life.

But if you're happy with the parts and tools you have, more power to you.

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1. Getting the whole GTD thing going invinvolves the completion of multiple projects.
2. Keeping it going requires routine actions.
3. Sometimes getting aspects of routines going are projects, too.
4. If you do not keep the necessary routines going, you will have crises.
5. These crises are then projects. These crises pull you out of any semblance of a routine.
6. Even if you do 1 and 2 with skill and diligence, every now and then you will need to make adjustments, and these are likely to be projects.
7. You will then need to change your routine.

Some of us have very fluctuating levels of energy, many demands in our lives, etc. Some of us are not so great with routines, but great with projects, and vice versa. I have the routine problem myself. However, I am pleased with the results of the parts I have implemented and grateful for the suggestions and comments by some of the expert practitioners on this board. I am getting better.

Some people are are in environments in which the atmosphere is a positive contribution, others are not.

A lot has to do with where you start--its like a group tennis lesson, some people are repeating the class every Spring, some graduate early to the intermediate group. And a lot has to do with

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I'm agree with the concept of avoiding putting out fires and the value routines. I am able to focus on new and more challenging projects because I'm not continuously putting out fires, which may vary but always end up being pretty much the same thing. It doesn't mean they don't happen anymore, they just have been minimized by at least 80 or 90%.

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Maybe one of the best things about a solid GTD practice is the ability to respond to fires when they happen without too much impact on the rest of your life....and, of course, eliminating self-created fires due to losing things, forgetting things, and severe procrastination.

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Maybe one of the best things about a solid GTD practice is the ability to respond to fires when they happen without too much impact on the rest of your life....and, of course, eliminating self-created fires due to losing things, forgetting things, and severe procrastination.

But is it possible to use the input handling processes from GTD to (somewhat) do this without the rest of the system - as per the original post in this thread?